Pictorial Autonomy

I took a philosophy course once, in which we briefly looked at the idea of autonomy. Dworkin and Benn were the two philosophers whose concepts of autonomy we studied. Our professor fit their ideas into a kind of continuum, basically a scale that you could fit people into, depending on how autonomous they are.

• The lowest level of the scale is non-autarchic people, who aren't able to properly take into account the things they learn, or think rationally.
• Then, autarchic people, otherwise known as "normal". Basically anyone who is able to think normally and process the things they learn in a more-or-less logical way. Most people in the world are autarchic.
• Then, people who count as autonomous according to Dworkin's criteria. More than just being autarchic, they can examine the way they think about things, and can even decide to change the way they make choices.
• The highest level of the scale is people who are autonomous by Benn's even stricter criteria. They are able to examine and change their decision-making processes as well, but they also consider everything for themselves, without letting other people guide them.

Just to make sure that I understood, I cranked out a few doodles representing the different levels of this scale. I ran them past my prof, and he okayed them, which made me feel a whole lot better about writing the midterm.

After that, I was just going to toss the doodles, since they'd served their purpose. Then I figured, why not slap them up on my website, to perplex random passersby? So here is my pictorial depiction of the concept of autonomy, for everyone to see:

And that's it, really.

You can email me if you want. Or visit the other pages of my website. I mean, there's nothing more to see here, so you might as well.